


Terza Rima and a Toccata for Piano

by luvanderwon



Series: SurvIvory [2]
Category: Havemercy Series - Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 23:30:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2791670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luvanderwon/pseuds/luvanderwon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>follow up to Ottava Rima</p>
            </blockquote>





	Terza Rima and a Toccata for Piano

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moonix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonix/gifts).



> Conversation vaguely mentions earlier off-screen prison violence.

After the storm, they lie quiet in the dark. 

The house is old, and it shivers under the rain, wrings out damp through the walls and gifts water with lodging space through cracks between the windows. Things rattle, when there’s thunder – and there seems to be an inordinate amount of thunder out here, on the Estate. Raphael hasn’t ever questioned whether that’s natural or not. 

He banks up his body and keeps Ivory close, tucks him in at the corners like a gentle dream; folds their fingers together in anchorage on his own stomach. Neither of them has said much, so far. Neither of them knows where to start. The storm curdles over to the east and out to sea, leaving the country dripping. 

There are things Raphael wants to ask. He wants to know where and how Ivory was damaged by his Ke-Han captors. He wants to know whether he has burn marks. He wants to tell the stories of his own scars, and he wants to tell Ivory about the baby dragons, but he can’t. Ivory will have to see them for himself, if he stays, and draw his own conclusions, because none of them can speak of it to anybody who wasn’t in that room with the Margrave Antoinette. It’s a curse which isn’t even rudely disguised as a blessing. He wants to know if they’ve brought Ivory here, to him, because he’s not the sort of man who will rehabilitate like Luvander managed and Balfour almost succeeded at doing. Raphael has never known Ivory outside of the Corps, he has never known civilian Ivory, and he finds he cannot picture it. 

He finds he still cannot think of any of them as civilians. 

They lie in the black treacle darkness, liquorice sour and molasses thick. Ivory breathes against his shoulder and neither of them sleep. There are too many things to be said and no way of knowing how to say them, because they’ve both got scars and they’re both supposed to be dead. 

Before the sun comes up, when it’s only leaking a milky promise beneath the heavily burdened branches of the trees on the horizon, Ivory asks Raphael if he wants to kiss him. The words fall against Raphael’s skin, an offer and a promise wrapped up together. It’s not a question he has ever asked before. Raphael has kissed Ivory hundreds and thousands of times, and that wasn’t enough, but never once did Ivory ask him if he wanted to. Usually, he prowled in and took whatever Raphael offered. That was how they worked: they both wanted, but Ivory preyed and Raphael allowed him to pounce. They only talked about it twice, after a stomach-clenching shift where they’d both nearly not come home, and right before they left for their suicide mission – if that brief exchange counted as talking. The last time they saw each other, Raphael hadn’t waited for Ivory to stalk him. He’d pulled the man into his room and crushed them together against the door; played predator himself because there wasn’t going to be time or space for writing this one down in verse afterwards. “If we make it back,” he’d whispered, and Ivory had finished for him:

“We’ll get the fuck out of here, together.” 

It was as close to _I love you_ as they’d ever come. 

Raphael remembers it, now, in the crushed velvet darkness of the room on the Greylace Estate which he doesn’t think will ever feel like home, though it’s closer to it tonight, with Ivory pressed against his ribs. “I mean,” he feels the words fall like snow against his neck, slivers of burnt offerings, and his spine aches. Ivory has never been insecure, has never been delicate or needed reassurance. Ivory has never needed to ask Raphael’s permission to kiss him. When he says “I know it’s different,” it feels like a whispered escape route, door propped open, secret passages beckoning, but Raphael doesn’t want them. He has never wanted them. “It’s not like before,” Ivory is saying, “and maybe you don’t want me now, or you don’t want to, but...”

Raphael cuts him off with his mouth, kisses Ivory and breathes “no, you’re wrong, I still want you,” against his lips; feels him swallow the words down. 

“Ok,” Ivory says, a peppery twist of two syllables, and curls his fingers in the hair at the nape of Raphael’s neck. 

They kiss to the sound of the rain making love to the window. Ivory still tastes like gunmetal and flame, and his lips are still a little dry, his tongue still swift and pointed, but it’s different. Raphael tries to forget, tries to be grateful, tries to remember how to squeeze out everything except what’s happening as he does this. He wants to kiss Ivory, has wanted nothing so much as to kiss Ivory ever since he last had the chance. The shock, the surprise of seeing the dead among the living, of being able to bring him to bed, of holding the trembling, corporeal weight of his lover in his arms while they waited out the storm instead of wrapping himself around a pillow and pretending, has not diminished Raphael’s desire to kiss Ivory. 

A part of him wants to shut down all his mind except sensory experience. He wants to feel nothing except Ivory’s mouth and his skin and his fingers. He doesn’t want to know anything except the way that Ivory feels underneath him, lean and slight and flimsy – and there’s that word again, that one he’s never associated with Ivory before, _delicate_. The only thing which was ever delicate about Ivory, before, was his temper and the papery skin on the insides of his wrists. A part of Raphael wants to find that skin and press it against his lips, trace his tongue down across Ivory’s palm and between his fingers, curve his mouth around the fragile skin that pulls there, stretched translucent with piano playing. He wants to be gentle, he wants to relearn Ivory’s body, discover the new scars and memorise them with his mouth so he can remember them accurately when he wakes up and finds this is another trauma dream and there’s nothing in his bed with him but loneliness and a book he won’t finish. 

And a part of him wants to grab Ivory’s hips and fuck him mercilessly against the mattress, pin him down with his claws and snarl his way through all the accusations; fuck through the choking knot of tears that have been building all evening at the back of his throat. How dare he be dead for so long, how dare he not come back before, how dare he put Raphael through all of that. The riptide of unwashed emotions curves through his body suddenly, under his skin, and it snaps him forwards. Raphael sinks his teeth into familiar and half-forgotten skin at Ivory’s collar and doesn’t flinch when Ivory yelps. 

After that it’s more like he remembers. That yelp frets itself down into a growl behind Ivory’s own teeth and he pushes Raphael on to his back and climbs over his hips, straddles him against the mattress and drops his face so they’re lined up nose to nose. “You still smell like paper,” he says, and it sounds like a threat. 

Raphael remembers learning once that the dreaming brain can’t conjure scent. Ivory still smells like charcoal and lemon, so either this is some extravagant _velikaia_ trick or he really isn’t dreaming after all. 

The brutal realisation is like a fist in the stomach, and he digs his fingers into Ivory’s thighs and rolls his hips, says “I don’t believe you’re real, yet,” as if he wants to convince himself, and Ivory bites him. 

“That real enough for you?” he snarls. 

They have sex like that, with Raphael on his back and Ivory astride his hips, and it is teeth and nails and pulling hair, gasping and grunting and swearing. The walls here aren’t soundproof but Raphael almost wants someone to overhear, wants knowing glances in the morning, wants everyone else to agree that Ivory is not just here and still alive but wanting him and touching him and making those noises into the sweat of his skin. He lets Ivory palm sounds and breath out of him, allows himself to forget and remember all at once. The shape of Ivory’s muscles, the twist of his hips and the dry salt of his flesh, the arch of his neck against Raphael’s teeth; the curve of his hip bones under Raphael’s palms: these things are the familiar, the places he has been before. His body is like a map with new marks, however, and the fretwork of scars on his ribcage and the waxy, scorched white skin on his shoulder and down his back are things Raphael is going to have learn anew. 

He comes with Ivory poised above him, fucking himself down slowly, rolling his hips against Raphael’s pelvis with an agonising precision which Raphael should have remembered but didn’t. He’s got Raphael’s mouth under his own, sucking his lower lip and moving with a rhythm that reminds Raphael of the dregs of his journey home with Ghislain, when the worst of the waves were behind them. He shudders; breaks apart as Ivory bruises his thumbs against the hollows of his shoulders and wrenches his face away to the side, embarrassed to find that his cheeks are wet. 

Ivory stops, holds himself still and sits back. There’s sweat glistening on his clavicle and the bridge of his nose. He wets his lips and finds Raphael’s hand, laces their fingers together. With his other, he brushes his thumb across the high tide of Raphael’s cheek. He whispers “don’t,” and it’s desperate, a broken plea that tumbles and gets caught in the atmosphere they’re both trying to pretend isn’t sulking between them. Raphael swallows, nods, and pulls Ivory back down against his chest. 

“Can I,” he asks, just to be prudent, because he’d never needed to, before. His fingers teeter at the head of Ivory’s cock, and he nods, staccato but certain against Raphael’s hair. Ivory has always been quiet in bed, has never made a vocal show of coming, and Raphael is distressed and glad to find this hasn’t changed when he strokes an orgasm out of him. Ivory keeps it secret, cradles it in a gasping, keening series of damp sighs that hit under Raphael’s ear and drizzle down his neck. 

“If you hadn’t been dead, if I’d known and couldn’t help like this, like the truth of things, it would have been worse,” he acknowledges, afterwards. They’re lying in the sweat and mess and wrinkled sheets in the quiet absolution of a dawn the colour of Ivory’s skin. “I don’t know what I’m angry about.” 

“We survived a war,” Ivory reminds him, fingers a delicate dance of misshapen bone against his shoulder. “You don’t need any other reason to be angry.” 

“Your skin’s different,” Raphael tells him, chastened. He rubs the side of his thumb across the bleached, puckered scab of new flesh over Ivory’s arm. 

“Yours, too,” Ivory reminds him, and hooks his own thumb in the corner of Raphael’s mouth, where his scar tugs his smile downwards. “But you still taste like you.” 

Raphael draws in a long breath, a big, shuddering throb of a thing which makes his chest hurt. He runs his fingers up through Ivory’s hair and feels the shape of his skull under his palm, reels him in and hides his face. He breathes out and lets himself feel the weight and heat and reality of Ivory, and presses his lips together against the great hulk of sobbing which sits in his stomach like lead. He says “I thought you were dead,” and his voice trembles on the edge of everything else. 

“I know,” Ivory tells him, and tightens his hold. “I know. I’m not.” 

~

When he wakes, his body is a protest and there is blood on the pillow. Raphael’s fingers clench and curl and his legs ache. Ivory is standing by the window. It’s still raining. Grey light casts shadows across his skin, the scarred and rebuilt side turned away from Raphael so he looks like an apparition, all the same shade Raphael remembers. “Ivory,” he says, and it hurts his throat. 

Ivory turns his head, blinks slowly like a cat. He says “Raphael”, low and careful, syllables threaded together like a catechism. He stretches out his hand and Raphael is a puppet, strings tangled in Ivory’s long, finicky fingers. He shivers himself out from the sheets, ignores the russet brown stain on the pillow case, and goes. Ivory’s palm is cool and his fingers don’t feel right. Raphael frowns, and raises Ivory’s hand to his mouth, runs his lips across his knuckles and spreads Ivory’s fingers out flat on his own palm. They are crooked and careless, the whimsical arrangement of spikes in a hedgerow. 

“What happened?” The words are on his tongue and out before he can stop them. 

Ivory doesn’t flinch. He stares at his own hand, palm to palm with Raphael’s investigative one, and says “they were broken.” The words feel separate from his body. 

“Oh,” bursts from Raphael’s lips like a sour berry, bitter juice of realisation dribbling from the corner of his mouth. “Oh, fuck, Ivory. I’m sorry. I’m – can you still. Ivory.” 

“I haven’t tried,” Ivory tells him, because he doesn’t need Raphael to make the words to know he’s asking about the piano. “There wasn’t any way to try,” he adds, in case that wasn’t clear. “Tell you the truth,” he admits with a cold shouldered shrug, because the truth is all they have left to tell but it still hurts, “I’m afraid to.” 

“There’s one here,” Raphael tells him, and smoothes his thumb over the back of Ivory’s thin wrist. Weak yellow sunlight simpers through the trees, flirting ineffectively with the rain. “Ivory.” 

“I want to know,” Ivory tells him, suddenly, and his blue eyes crash against the shore of Raphael’s brown ones and they’re both shipwrecked. “I want to know everything, I want to know how you got out and what happened to your face, and who else is here. Why are we here, why are they hiding us, Raphael? I want to know everything I’ve missed.”

“I know,” Raphael nods, unhappily. “I was the same. When Ghislain told me you were dead I spent three days puking,” he pulls a face, remembering the smell of the poor little boat, feeling his stomach fist itself up angrily around the recollected nausea. He doesn’t know why he’s telling Ivory this, now. “I let him think I was seasick. I know what human flesh smells like when it’s burning, Ivory, and you – and I – and we were supposed to get out of here, remember, if we both survived? Do you remember that?” 

“I remember,” Ivory nods, and slides his broken hand up from Raphael’s open palm and over his shoulder, cups his jaw, presses his thumb to the scar at the corner of his mouth again: imitation of last night’s intimacy and atmosphere. “I remember being too afraid to tell you I loved you.” 

Raphael closes his eyes. “What were you afraid of?” he whispers. 

He feels Ivory shrug, the shifting sand of movement that nudges the hand against his face. “Being weak. If I was in love with you, I could be destroyed by you not coming home. If I was in love with you and you died, so did I.” 

“But I didn’t die,” Raphael reminds him. “And neither did you.” 

“So we were supposed to get out of here. Together.”

This time, when Ivory kisses him he doesn’t ask first and Raphael doesn’t try to forget or remember. He lets himself get lost, instead, lets Ivory promise him things without saying a word; keeps his eyes closed and keens against Ivory’s mouth. His fingers close on Ivory’s biceps and there are hands on the back of his hips and the small of his back. Ivory drags him down to the floor and kisses his face and his neck and his collar, licks the scar on his mouth and presses his lips softly against Raphael’s eyelids and the tips of his cheeks. He leaves a damp trail of remembrance across his features and dips his tongue in the valley between his collarbones. Raphael clutches and whimpers and fists his hands in Ivory’s hair. 

Ivory says “tell me about this,” and touches the scar again. 

So Raphael tells him and Ivory kisses one of his fingers for every bad memory, and then he kisses Raphael’s neck and says “tell me who else is alive apart from Ghislain and the chief.” And Raphael hums and lets Ivory open his palm and spread his fingers on his chest, chase a nipple with his thumb, and he tells him Balfour’s here, and Rook’s not, and Luvander is in town “and that’s all,” he says, breath catching like a wound. “That I know.” 

Ivory says “tell me how you got home,” and Raphael does, without any embellishment and without the fisherman’s daughter, as Ivory runs his fingers over his skin and kneads old patterns into new flesh. When he’s finished, Ivory crooks his head to one side and takes Raphael’s hands and lays them flat against his burn marks and says “my turn,” before explaining how he’d been caught in a streak of flame when he came off Cassiopeia before she made violent, destructive acquaintance with one of the towers in the Lapis city. 

“I saw that,” Raphael rasps. He remembers the colours. 

Ivory tells him about the claw crease of scars on his ribs, about the bones which broke and mended again; about all the things that happened between Lapis and Ghislain. A steady, uncomfortable heat grows in Raphael’s gut, licking through his veins and up his body until it is hammering for admittance at his head, and he clutches at Ivory, stalls his wandering hands and pushes his mouth against his throat. “Can I kill them,” he says, and it is not a question. The words bubble from somewhere primordial. 

“No,” Ivory soothes, and buries his hands in Raphael’s hair. “That’s not what I want. That’s not what I need.” 

“What do you need,” Raphael asks of his skin, and Ivory shivers, crowds himself closer and wets his lips. 

“I need you to still want me.” 

“I never stopped.” 

“Good,” Ivory says, and folds Raphael up against like the creased pages of a battered book. “That’s good.” 

As the sun woos and teases with the rain across the golden, drowned landscape of the Greylace Estate, he adds, softly, “so. When are we going to get out of here, then? Just the two of us?”


End file.
